Mission to Moscow

Well, it looks as if the Far East Side Minyan is heading back east.

But not to the Far East.

Thursday morning, I had a telephone interview with a major language school chain in Russia. Having learned my lesson about being too explicit on my blog regarding employers and employment, I will not say which one. But it is one of the major ones operating in the country.

I had been unsure whether the interview went well. The recruiter asked me how I would go about explaining articles to Russians. This would naturally be a big concern to any language school operating in the land of Pushkin and Putin, because Russian has no articles and Russians learning English have a difficult time learning to use English articles correctly. Somehow, I got myself tongue-tied and, despite having a thorough command of English grammar, managed to mix up definite (the) and indefinite (a, an) articles. I thought this slip would definitely sink my application.

To my surprise and delight, however, I received an e-mail Friday offering me a position in one of the school's Moscow branches. And to my greater surprise, by Saturday night I had decided to take it.

I say surprise, because the deal offered in Moscow was nowhere near as good as the deals I was starting to be offered in Korea. My pay will be $1000 per month, in Roubles, plus free accomodation, free Russian lessons, free visa support, and at least some medical costs. This is about half the pay I could get in Korea.

But I find lately that I am looking at my life in new ways. A very wise person I met in Taiwan (a regular reader of this blog, who will no doubt recognize himself in this) sort of made the point to me that life was not just the accumulation of money, but also the accumulation of experiences. And the truth is that, right now, Russia is an experience I want, while Korea is not.

There are some good possibilities of a turn in Russia leading me to places I may want to be later on. I've given a bit of thought to doing some graduate work studying the Haskalah (briefly, the period in the mid-nineteenth century when the newly emancipated Jews of Europe were forced to confront the Enlightenment). Much of the Haskalah took place in Eastern Europe. And I think the study of Russian Jewry in this period could be particularly fascinating.

The chance to learn Russian for free is also appealing. I had wanted to learn Russian when I came to Columbia, when I was a wild-eyed kid with vague dreams of reading The Brothers Karamazov in the original. But I got behind on corrections of homework and had a pretty incomprehensible Russian teacher whose native language was neither Russian nor English, but Italian. And so I promptly dropped Russian. This is a chance to pick it up again.

I expect to leave for Moscow in about a month. It will take some time for my school to issue me a letter of invitation, which is a prerequisite for obtaining a visa. Then there will be applying for the visa (hopefully by post) before I go. I gather from talking to the school that it would be at least three weeks to a month before I could find myself on an Aeroflot flight.